Realfind: managing personal items in the physical world

While in recent years some effort has been put into helping users manage their personal information in their computers, little has been done to provide meaningful ways to organize and retrieve a user's personal physical objects. Nowadays, technologies such as RFID tags can help bridge the gap between the real and electronic worlds. We propose that a tool that keeps track of the users' objects and seamlessly inter-relates information about them with other relevant autobiographical and contextual data, about the users and their activities, can help manage and retrieve both physical and electronic items in meaningful ways. We describe a prototype tool, RealFind that allows this to take place in a synergistic and effective way. Objects can be searched for based on their properties, but also by relating them to a wide range of contextual information stored on their computers.